Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing

Part I Preliminaries 1 Introduction 1.1 Prologue: Rationalist and Empiricist Approaches 1.2 Scientific Content 1.2.1 Questions that linguistics should answer 1.2.2 Non 1.2.3 Language and cognition as probabilistic phenomena 1.3 The Ambiguity of Language: Why NLP is Difficult 1.4 Dirty Hands 1.4.1 Lexical resources 1.4.2 Word counts 1.4.3 Zipf’s laws 1.4.4 Collocations 1.4.5 Concordances 1.5 Further Reading 1.6 Exercises 2 Mathematical Foundations 2.1 Elementary Probability Theory 2.1.1 Probability spaces 2.1.2